It’s the stuff of nightmares for parents. A nine-year old girl named Carol Ann Dougherty was raped and murdered in a church way back in 1962. When she didn’t come home, her family went looking and her body was discovered in the church’s choir loft by her father.
Carol, a fifth-grader at St. Mark’s, had returned from school Monday, Oct. 22, 1962. She told her mother she was going to ride her bike to the nearby Bristol Library to return books.
She stopped in the church, probably to pray as the nuns encouraged students to do, and likely to climb to the choir loft to look at the huge pipe organ, as a lot of kids liked to do. Back in those days the church was usually open.
When she didn’t return home for dinner, Frank and Dorothy looked for her. Seeing her bike — her prized blue and white Londoner — parked outside the church, Frank went in and found her semi-nude, twisted, dead.
It was a horror from which he never fully recovered.
This week, a long dead criminal was definitively identified as her killer. His names was William Schrader.
William Schrader, who was 20 when he killed little Carol Ann Dougherty, lived not far from the church and had been dishonorably discharged from the U.S. Army. While he was long considered the primary suspect in Carol Ann’s death, authorities never had enough evidence to put him away for it…
“I stand before you with profound sorrow but with such gratitude,” said Dougherty’s only surviving relative, younger sister Kay Talanca, at a Wednesday press conference. “Because of you my family has the truth it has sought for six decades. Though nothing can bring Carol back, we can finally let her rest in peace, the truth revealed.”
Talanca thanked a local reporter and a podcaster for keeping the case in the public eye.
That local reporter was JD Mullane who wrote a six-part story about the case in 1992 when it was already 30 years old. That brought renewed interest to the case and Schrader was identified at the time as the likely suspect. Unfortunately, there wasn’t enough evidence at the time to secure a conviction.
By 1992, Carol’s story had long dropped from the headlines. It hadn’t been reported on in years.
Then came our series. Bristol Det. Randy Morris reinvestigated. Soon he identified Schrader as the killer.
Before he could fully investigate, the DA’s office took the county file from Bristol and put the case before a grand jury, derailing Morris’s effort. Schrader was extradited to Bucks County from Louisiana, where he was serving 21 years in Angola prison for killing a 12-year-old girl.
When asked if he killed Carol, he pleaded the Fifth Amendment, and he was returned to Louisiana. The case stalled again.
The evidence that finally changed the outcome came last year, when Schrader’s stepson came forward. The stories I’ve read aren’t exactly clear on why the stepson waited 22 years to share Schrader’s confession with the police.
Investigators said the evidence they needed to pin the crime on Schrader came a year ago from his stepson, Robert LeBlanc.
Before his 2002 death at 62 in a Louisiana prison, Schrader confessed to the heinous crime during a conversation with LeBlanc, who contacted authorities in the fall of 2024. Schrader claimed he murdered a girl in Pennsylvania, fearful she would report him for the rape if he let her live.
The case was closed through eyewitness accounts, Schrader’s confession, and a recent DNA match on a hair recovered from Carol Ann’s clenched fist, according to Bucks County District Attorney Jen Schorn.
Unfortunately, Carol Ann Dougherty’s parents did not live to see this case solved and Schrader did not live to face any justice for what he’d done. Presumably a killer wouldn’t be able to get away with this today. Given the same evidence, DNA would probably identify him pretty quickly.
For Carol’s surviving sister this outcome was still a relief. Here’s a local news report on the case.
Editor’s Note: The Schumer Shutdown is here. Rather than put the American people first, Chuck Schumer and the radical Democrats forced a government shutdown for healthcare for illegals. They own this.
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